Untelo/Sandbox – User

The ALB1 format is a generic object graph serialization format used by at least Visitor 4 (Terrain Builder).

Structure

Header

The file begins with a header describing its version, as well as some other so far unknown attributes.

struct Header
{
	uint8_t magic[4]; // "ALB1"
	uint32_t version;
	uint32_t unknown1;
	uint32_t unknown2;
};

The header is followed by two tables containing the names of classes and fields.

struct TagTables
{
	TagTable fieldTable; // The id of the table is always 2, corresponding to "tags" in the field table.
	TagTable classTable; // The id of the table is always 3, corresponding to "classes" in the field table.
};

The tag table contains a header similar to a field, but its type of pair does not match the usual meaning.

struct TagTable
{
	uint16_t id;
	FieldType type; // The type is always pair (0x0F).

	uint32_t size;
	TagTableEntry data[size];
};

Each tag table entry contains an identifier and a string specifying the name of the tag. Note that the tag identifier does not correlate with the index of the entry in the table.

struct TagTableEntry
{
	uint16_t id;
	Field_string name;
};

Root object

Following the header and tag tables, there is a single root object filling the rest of the file. However the root object is not a field, and so it does not contain the usual field header.

Thus the entire file can be described using the following structure:

struct ALB1
{
	Header header;
	TagTables tables;
	Field_object object;
};

Field

The format uses fields prefixed with name and type. The name is given as an identifier corresponding to an entry in the tag table. The type is one of the value from the FieldType enumeration.

enum FieldType : uint8_t
{
	signed_char				= 0x01, // 8 bit signed
	unsigned_char			= 0x02, // 8 bit unsigned
	signed_short			= 0x03, // 16 bit signed
	unsigned_short			= 0x04, // 16 bit unsigned
	signed_int				= 0x05, // 32 bit signed
	unsigned_int			= 0x06, // 32 bit unsigned
	signed_long				= 0x07, // 32 bit signed
	unsigned_long			= 0x08, // 32 bit unsigned
	bool					= 0x09,
	float					= 0x0A,
	string					= 0x0B,
	array					= 0x0C,
	object					= 0x0D,
	object_pointer			= 0x0E,
	pair					= 0x0F,
	array_signed_short		= 0x10,
	array_signed_int		= 0x11,
	array_float				= 0x12,
	empty					= 0x13,
	double					= 0x14,
	array_double			= 0x15,
};

struct Field
{
	uint16 tag; // Corresponds to an entry in the tag table.
	FieldType type;
	byte data[]; // Followed by polymorphic data blob which content is determined by the type field.
};

Fundamental types

For fundamental C types, the field data contains only that value using the Microsoft x86 ABI. This means that the signed and unsigned long data types have a width of 32 bits, the same as signed and unsigned int.

All integers use little endian, and the floating point types conform to IEEE-754 binary32 and binary64 for float and double respectively.

When deserializing, some fields are implicitly converted to the types used by the program if there is a mismatch. Conversions may be applied between integers and floating points. However the sign of the value may not change. Also not all fields are subject to conversion. In particular a type mismatch in certain version fields may cause a deserialization failure.

String

The string data type is a length-prefixed non-null-terminated string, using a 16 bit length prefix:

struct Field_string
{
	uint16_t size;
	char data[size];
};

Size prefixed data blobs

Fields with the array or object data types are both length-prefixed using a 32 bit length describing the size of the data blob, excluding the prefix.

struct DataBlob
{
	uint32_t size;
	byte blob[size];
};

Array

The generic array data type contains an array of fields, their number given by a second size prefix.

struct Field_array
{
	uint32_t size;
	Field data[size];
};

Object and object pointer

Both the object and object pointer data types share a common header. The header contains a class type identifier corresponding to an entry in the class table, and an address field uniquely identifying the object in the entire graph. The unique identifier is presumably the 32 bit runtime address of the object at the time of serialization. It is used for linking pointers in the object graph during deserialization.

struct ObjectHeader
{
	int16_t class; // Corresponds to an entry in the class table.
	uint32_t address;
};

The object data type contains a number of fields. The number of fields is not given, but the size of the data blob is used to determine the end of the object. Note that object fields contain the blob size prefix mentioned previously.

struct Field_object
{
	ObjectHeader header;
	Field fields[]; // Arbitrary number of fields.
};

The object pointer data type is a stripped down version of the header of the object data type. However it only contains the type and address of the object, with the address corresponding to an object somewhere in the graph.

struct Field_object_pointer
{
	ObjectHeader header; // header.address corresponds to the header.address of some object in the graph.
};

Pair

The pair data type simply holds two fields. It is primarily used by associative containers.

struct Field_pair
{
	Field first;
	Field second;
};